Social networks are being demonized these days in Spain. Everything started when a journalist discovered that a 17 year old girl killed in Seville had a profile on Tuenti, a Spanish social network, and so did her friends. One of them has confessed being the criminal.

A local newspaper in Seville published an article under the title “An asassination of the Generation 2.0″. Letters that the killed girl wrote to the boy who killed her were published together with pictures taken from her profile. TV stations were even more radical, comparing this social network with a paradise for criminals.

People at Tuenti are not very happy. They think that mainstream media are using this case as a tool to fight against new media, which are attracting their users. They are very worried by the image that social networks are getting in Spain, specially with concerned parents that could start forbidding their children the use of the Internet.

To the point that Tuenti, which is only available for invited users, has changed its rules. It has deleted all profiles of people related to this case, as they became a “circus”, and has cancelled the possibility of seeing anybody’s picture but for people who are related in first or second degrees.

What mainstream media are not mentioning so much is the fact that social networks have also been used to aggregate solidarity for the girl’s family. Facebook and Tuenti now hold lots of small groups in which people express their support from anywhere in Spain.

Facebook is doing around $35m in digital goods sales. In November anonymous insiders suggested that it was closer to $50-60m in digital goods sales. That’s a healthy run rate, but I think Facebook could make a few product changes to do even better.

I’ll split my suggestions into three categories: Opportunity, Means, and Motive.

I. Opportunity

Facebook has made some smart changes to its digital goods/gifts product recently, highlighting upcoming friends birthdays on the home page,prompting gifts on birthdays and allowing users to buy birthday gifts in advance. As birthday gifting is the most common usecase for Facebook digital goods, these are changes that increase a users opportunity to buy virtual goods.

Facebook could increase gifting opportunities by prompting gift giving on other calendar events as well. Some are natural gift giving holidays, such as Christmas, Chinese New Year, Valentines day etc. It already provides a selection of holiday specific gifts for each of these occasions. Facebook could generalize the “birthday” section on the homepage into a “calendar” and note upcoming events that are gift worthy, and perhaps even suggest recipients. For example, if you are “in a relationship” with someone on Facebook, then they would be a natural person to prompt for a Valentines day gift.

Chinese New Year themed virtual gifts

Facebook could also prompt gift giving on certain notifications in the feed that might be “gift worthy”. Especially notable are changes in relationship status (e.g. moving from “in a relationship” to “married” or to “single” for example), but others might include changing address (housewarming gift?), changing educational or job status (graduation gift, or new job gift etc).

Finally, Facebook could prompt for gifting more generally through more, and more direct, calls to action. “Give a gift” is the fourth option for writing on someone’s wall, and moving it to first would likely increase gifting immediately. So would prompting for gift giving (not just comments) on Status Updates on a profile and in the news feed. Simply putting a link to “gifts” as the default first application in the application box in the right rail would help.

I suspect that increasing opportunity could increase gift giving by 50-100%.

II. Means

Last year Facebook switched from denominating gifts in dollars to gift credits. This was a good first step as users tend to be more willing to spend virtual currencies than real money, even when they are readily interchangeable.

Currently there is only one way to buy Facebook gift credits, and that is via a credit card. But a lot of Facebook users don’t have or don’t use credit cards. They may want to be able to buy and give gifts, but they can’t do so. This is a common problem for a lot of game developers, including many game developers on Facebook. The techniques that worked for them can work for Facebook too.

As a start, Facebook could enable additional payment mechanisms, including Paypal, cell phone billing (including premium SMS) and direct debit from checking accounts. With such an international audience, additional payments mechanisms would allow many of Facebook’s international users to more easily buy gift credits.

Some Facebook users, especially those younger than 18, may not have access to any payment mechanisms other than cash. Accepting cash in envelopes for Facebook points would not scale very well. However, many game companies have been successful in getting their branded prepaid cards distributed at retail. This is one way of turning user’s cash into a payment mechanism that can be used online. Facebook has the brand awareness to do the same thing by striking deals directly with the two biggest distributors of prepaid cards, Incomm and Blackhawk. Alternatively, if they did not want to deal with retailers directly, a company like GMG Entertainment could handle it for them.

However, some users don’t have any money at all to spend on gift credits. Super Rewards and Offerpal have found one way to reach this market, through incentive offers. These companies allow users to trade their attention (through filling out market research surveys, applying for credit cards, getting a free trial of a service, signing up for email newsletters or other activities) for virtual currency. They take the bounty paid by the company acquiring the user, and use some of that to buy the user their virtual currency. Facebook could enable users to buy gift credits with incentive offers.

The combination of these tactics to increase Means to buy digital goods could provide an additional lift of 50-100% in digital gifts revenue.

III. Motive

Let us start by understanding the motives of gift givers. Gifting serves the same purposes on Facebook as it does in the real world. Firstly, it serves to strengthen social ties. Secondly, it serves to draw the receivers attention to the gift giver. Facebook can increase motivation for gift giving by playing into these two familiar behaviors, looking to the real world for conventions that can easily be borrowed.

Strengthening Social Ties

One of the strongest conventions of gift giving is reciprocity. It is awkward to receive a holiday card from someone that you did not send a card to. So too with virtual gifts. But right now it is difficult to know who has given you a Facebook gift. Since virtual gifts are given with the context of the wall, the wall is the best place to highlight gift giving. If each time I visited a friends wall I could prominently see what gifts that friend had given me, that would increase the pressure for me to buy a virtual gift for my friend to accompany my wall posting, especially so if it was a gift giving occassion (such as a birthday, holiday etc). Of course the opposite is also true - if a friend had not given me any virtual gifts you would not want to highlight that at the point at which I was considering whether to give a gift myself.

Gift giving is strongly influenced by immediate social norms. If I were to show up a dinner party empty handed when all the other guest had brought a bottle of wine, I would also feel awkward. People look to the behavior of others to see what is appropriate for their own behavior. Once again, the wall is the right place to highlight this. Right now the wall displays all postings in reverse chronological order. Since a new wall posting appears on the top of the wall, you will only see the most recent postings on your friends wall, many of which may not have digital gifts attached. What if the top postings on the wall were those with virtual gifts attached, and then reverse chronological order after that? (Perhaps with some time limitation, so that top posts would be virtual gifts received say in the last week). This would create a sense of social pressure to a visitor to the wall who would see virtual gift giving as a social norm. This will be especially effective around traditional gifting occasions as before. By highlighting desired behavior, you can influence social norms in the direction that you want.

Drawing Attention to the Gift Giver

Facebook can be a noisy environment. On your birthday you can receive 10s and even 100s of birthday well wishes. That is a lot of messages to sort through, and often these wishes are not responded to individually due to the volume. How can I make my well wishes stand out from the rest? How can I show how good a friend I am or how much I care? One way is to attach a virtual gift. Because the gift is not free, the very act of attaching a gift serves to differentiate my message from the rest. This is visible not just to the recipient, but also to all other visitors to the profile. Facebook could makes product changes to make this differentiation more prominent. One way would be to “pin” gifts to the top of the wall for some period, as noted in the preceding paragraph. Another would be to similarly “pin” gifts received to the top of the News Feed page for some period, ensuring that the gift is noticed and emphasized to the recipient. Finally, having a small profile picture accompany the gift, instead of just the name of the giver on the News Feed would serve to further draw attention to the gift giver.

Building from this approach, gift giving draws attention but it currently cannot draw gradations of attention. The absence or presence of a gift is the only distinction because all gifts currently cost the same (with the exception of free sponsored gifts). If Facebook were to provide gifts of different prices and levels, this would enable a gift giver to express their interest in a more nuanced way. One problem with implementing this approach on Facebook is the sheer volume of available gifts. There are over 300 Facebook gifts available today. It will be hard, if not impossible, for a gift recipient to tell what is a more valuable gift versus a less valuable gift just by looking at the gift. HotOrNot’s Meet Me solved this problem by starting with a small range of gifts with value tied to a conventional scale; flowers, ranging from the least valuable daisies to the most valuable red roses. Given the profusion of gifts available on Facebook today, Facebook would need to find some other way of demonstrating value to a recipient than relying on the image itself. Perhaps it could show the point value of each gift when the gift displays. But that is a bit crass - it is like leaving the price tag on a gift. It may need more creativity to make this obvious. Facebook could change the background color of the gifts according to a scale of value that is well enough understood: perhaps white - bronze - silver - gold? This would allow for the current large range of gifts but make it easy to tell at a glance the gradations of value.

Obviously, allowing gifts to have a range of prices will increase the average sales price of gifts, hence increasing revenue from digital gifts sales.

Motivation for Gift Receivers

Looking at gift givers motivations is only half the story. The other half of the story is the gift recipient. What are their motivations?

One simple dynamic to increase gift recipients’ motivation to receive gifts is to make gift getting competitive. Keep track of how many gifts have been received and display this prominently. This could be done on the profile page; in the same way that number of friends is tracked and thumbnails of friends shown, number of gifts receieved and thumbnails of gifts received could also be shown. Or it could be made even more explicit with leaderboards for the people who have received the most gifts. The power of displaying metrics to drive behavior is well documented by game designers. (If you haven’t read Amy Jo Kim’s work on game design for social environments, you should). Once people want to receive more gifts, they will start acting in ways that encourage gift giving, whatever that might be.

Game design provides a second possible mechanic to induce gift recipients to want more gifts; collecting. Gifts are all treated the same right now. If Facebook were to offer awards and achievements for getting “sets” of gifts, you would most likely see some users work very hard to collect gifts to complete those sets. PackRat has shown just how powerful and addictive collecting behavior can be on Facebook. Facebook could for example offer a free [birthday cupcake] to give to someone else if you were given five [birthday cupcakes], or put a custom Christmas skin on your wall if you received 10 Christmas themed gifts.

I believe that through increasing the motivations of gift givers and gift receivers, Facebook could see a more than doubling of their virtual gifts revenue.

Seventeen Internet firms, including Facebookand Myspace, have agreed to take steps to protect children inEurope from abuse on social networking sites, the European Commission said Tuesday.

In a pact signed in Luxembourg, the companies agreed to put a "report abuse" button on their sites allowing people under 18 to report inappropriate contact or conduct by another user by clicking on it.

They will also ensure that the online profiles and contact lists of users under 18 are set to "private", making it harder to get in contact with young people, and make sure that they cannot be located with a search engine.

The firms will also prevent under-age users from accessing their services.

The pact is aimed at stopping cyberbullying -- where children are harassed on the Internet or with mobile phone messages -- grooming, in which adults befriend children to abuse them, and protecting personal data.

"With one click, you can easily harass someone, intimidate someone, particularly if they are under 18 years old," a commission spokesman said.

The commission, the EU's executive arm and which brokered the agreement, estimates that almost 42 million people regularly use social networking sites in the 27-nation bloc and that this number will rise to 107 million by 2012.

The companies involved are Arto, Bebo, Dailymotion, Facebook,Giovani.it, Google/YouTube, Hyves, Microsoft Europe, Myspace,Nasza-klaza.pl, Netlog, One.lt, Skyrock, StudiVZ, Sulake/Habbo Hotel, Yahoo!Europe and Zap.lu.

Are you looking for a way to monetize Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al? This company offers solutions that are geared both towards advertisers and publishers, and these include demographic targeting that takes into account location, gender and age. For its part, publishers are provided advertisements that are pre-filtered by way of ad tags. You can procure as many of these tags as you wish, and put them into practice right away. For the time being, only publishers will be able to use the site to the full, as some adjustments are still taking place regarding the advertising services on offer. If you are a publisher you can get started by furnishing some basic contact and profile information and submitting the URL of your newly-launched application. This solution is presented by Triana Global, and it has launched recently (that is why some features are not already fully implemented). If you would like further information, a contact form is included as part of the “About” page. You can also reach this Los Angeles-based team at media@shopit.com in order to dispel any doubts that you might have.

Let’s face it: a growing number of people are using Twitter these days, spending a lot of time on Twitter, and still need to get things done on Twitter. If you want to spend a lot of time conversing with people on Twitter, that’s great … but many people still need to get their tasks done.
Let’s take a look at how to do that. Why use Twitter to get things done? Twitter isn’t necessarily the best platform for getting things done … but if you’re already using it a lot, it might be easier or faster for you to do things while still in Twitter. Note: I don’t take responsibility for any of these services — if they don’t work well, check with them! :)

Here’s how:

1. Reminders. Need a quick reminder that you have an appointment, or need to follow up on something later? Follow “timer” on Twitter, and send it a direct message with a reminder time and it will ping you at that time. For example: “d timer 30 pick up Chloe”.

2. To-do list: A couple of popular to-do services are on Twitter: Remember the Milk (on Twitter) and Nozbe (on Twitter). Follow them and send them direct messages to add things to your to-do list, or to check the items on your list.

3. Calendar. If you use Google Calendar (gCal), go to Twittercal, then follow gCal on Twitter and add events by sending direct messages to gCal. For example: “d gcal meeting with paul tomorrow at 7pm”.

4. Delegate. If you’re going through your to-do list or email and find a task that’s better suited for someone else, sending that person a direct message (assuming they’re on Twitter) can be quicker and easier than sending an email or making a phone call.

5. Follow up. The same applies to following up. I’ve done it a bunch of times — instead of opening up your email program, composing a new message, typing in the person’s address and the subject line, and then writing the email … you can just direct message them on Twitter: “d zen_habits don’t forget to answer my interview questions, you berk!”

6. Accountability with goals. Want some extra motivation to achieve your goals? Announce through Twitter or on your blog that you’re going to post your progress updates every day on Twitter. For example, if you’re trying to eat healthier, you can post everything you eat on Twitter. Trying to exercise? Post your workouts on Twitter. It’s great motivation, and you can get some support and encouragement from your Twitter friends.

7. Get info or ideas quickly. If you have a good Twitter network, you can ask a question and usually get a few responses quicker than many other methods. I’ve gotten website and service recommendations, ideas for a post I was writing, restaurant recommendations, people interested in a job, and more.

8. Do real work. It’s possible to do real work on Twitter — people have written stories or posts by writing them in little chunks in Twitter. It might be worth a try. But if that doesn’t work, my strongest recommendation is to turn Twitter off when you need to do some real work. Then, when you’re done, reward yourself with 10 minutes on Twitter.

Other useful Twitter services:

Tweetbeep: A service to keep track of keywords through alerts that you set up. You’ll get an email notification if anyone mentions you or your brand or your blog posts in their tweets. Note: It looks like this service is down right now but they say they’ll be back soon.

StrawPoll: create a poll. Your Twitter contacts can participate in the poll by simply sending an @reply message.

TwitResponse: allows you to schedule delivery of your tweets — very useful if you want to set up a bunch of tweets in the future.

Zen Habits: Yes, you can get updates on the latest Zen Habits posts, as well as The Power of Less Tips of the Day, and more.

After launching our updated Facebook application statistics tool, it become apparent who the real leaders of the Facebook platform are: social gaming networks. Both Playfish and Zynga dominate the platform in terms of engagement by a wide margin. While Slide and RockYou have a wider reach, the top two social gaming networks have a much higher level of engagement. Remember when some bloggers were arguing that Facebook would one day dominate the enterprise? At this point it would be fairly difficult to support such an argument.

Social platforms are for entertainment, not for productivity. Take a look at the top iPhone applications and you’ll see a similar trend: social games and entertainment applications dominate the leaderboard. While we may use a few utility applications once in a while on these platforms, much of our time will be spent on entertainment. If this assertion is assumed to be accurate, this could have interesting implications for social platforms.


Beyond media and entertainment, there may not be many other products that can experience success on these platforms. It also makes me wonder how saturated this market already is. If we are all essentially building media companies, the odds of building a successful media company is extremely low. That means Facebook is much better for promoting your business than building a business. Also interesting to note is that just like the blog leaderboards which were once dominated by individual bloggers and are now dominated by teams of bloggers, the vast majority of leading developers are groups, not individuals.

While becoming a leader on the Facebook platform has become increasingly challenging, it appears that your best bet is investing in social gaming. So if we’re all playing games on Facebook, what games are you playing?

It’s not the first social network that caters to wealthy people only, and it won’t be the last: Affluence is the latest company to take a crack at building a community site exclusively for the rich and famous among us instead of the petty riff-raff that make up the bulk of internet users.

Unlike its most famous competitor aSmallWorld (there’s also Diamond Lounge and Qube), Affluence doesn’t require you to be invited in order to be eligible to become a member. No, you can simply register, free of charge. That is, if you can demonstrate you have a minimum household net worth of $3 million or a minimum annual household income of $300,000. Or if you have 5 other people who qualify tell Affluence that you are upper class enough to become a member of the virtual country club; that should do the trick as well.

Once you get into the network, Affluence promises to make your wealthy lifestyle even better, offering you access to a dedicated “Concierge” who will assist you in spending your money on the right luxury hotels, restaurants and nightclubs, make sure you attend the most exclusive parties and events across the globe, and gives you access to a proprietary luxury print magazine called Affluence Magazine. It’s a social network, so you also get to mingle with other millionaires and billionaires. I didn’t get in, but I’m pretty sure you can’t attack other socially elite people with virtual zombies (I’m still digging for confirmation on that).

All kidding aside, I’m convinced there’s a genuine need for this type of service, and ultimately it’s the personal experience of the members that counts. Some day, I hope to tell you what that personal experience feels like. Until then, you can take a look at the screenshot below, which shows the profile of Affluence’s President and CEO Scott Mit



chell.

TechCrunch is reporting Saturday night that Twitter may have signed a term sheet with one or more venture capital firms that would value the microblogging company at $250 million. Although it did not provide specifics, the report cited "a source with knowledge of the deal."

Last fall, Facebook was said to have made an offer to buy Twitter worth as much as $500 million. "Rumor is Twitter hit up more than a few venture firms to pitch the $250 million valuation, and got more than one 'no,'" TechCrunch wrote Saturday. "But someone's bit, perhaps encouraged by Twitter's breakneck growth and the interest from Facebook. That means Twitter gets a new cash injection and time to figure out its business model at an even more leisurely pace." That certainly would be a boon for Twitter, which until now has not shown signs of a viable business model. Though it is growing rapidly and has millions of users, no one knows how the company could support itself. Some have worried that while it is increasingly useful to the many people who rely on it, it might not be financially viable over time. If the TechCrunch report is accurate, however, it would be a signal that Twitter has managed to show investors enough of a structure of a business model to loosen up the cash it needs to get over that hump. Given today's general economic crisis, that would be a notable accomplishment.